


How Few Remain:

by TheLightdancer



Category: The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Bad Ending, F/F, For Want of a Nail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:21:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28725771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: Five possibilities for the life of the second oldest of the Endless.
Relationships: Death of the Endless/Lara Lor-Van
Kudos: 1





	How Few Remain:

1) _She does not listen:_

A Coluan girl stared at her, then, in the earliest years of that world, when it was barely from the age when its people had chipped stone and tied it to sticks and seen this as their greatest feats. It was ancient then, well before Krypton and Sol III were habitable. Long, long before the most distant ancestors of Vril Dox were distant probabilities. An icy and austere figure appeared over a broken body, caught beneath the fangs of the predators that would be long-extinct when the Coluans reached a next phase of technology that replaced the stick with a trigger. 

She saw this Coluan, tall and austere, her hands folded around a strange sigil, like a half-formed hook or cross.

_**Come, child. It is time.** _

The child stared at her, hostility in her. She was dead, and this frigid thing stood before her and this was all she said?

"How would _you_ like it?" It was a question fraught with meaning, one that in most worlds would have hinged the very identity of one of the Seven. In this one the austere and icy figure looked at her with disdain like a bug beneath her shoe.

_**I can never encounter my own gift, child, so why would I care?** _

Death extended her hand and she felt the touch and then she vanished. On Colu a woman brittle and weak inside beneath a persona of ice stood and turned away.

Billions of years later, her sister died and she said nothing, merely took her hand, and then vanished, the only one of the Endless absent at her funeral.

Billions of years after this, her brother was captured after a bitter struggle with a vortex, and when he needed her most, she did answer his plea for help and the sight of his peril finally cracked the ice.

In the wasteland that had been the Earth, he stared at her in horror, and the being of cracked ice simply vanished in the sound of her wings.

2) _She plays games with mortals:_

_Why am I still here?_

The voice was lonely, so dreadfully, dreadfully lonely. The world she was on was a dead world, and she the singular living being in it. 

She heard soft silky laughter in an undeniably and truly beautiful voice, a being like a woman striding toward her.

_**Because you are very beautiful, Lara Lor-Van, and so very sad.** _

_Where is Jor? Where is Kal?  
_

**_You know, daughter of Krypton._ **

The beautiful pale, unnaturally so, Kryptonian pointed and she could see her husband and her son immortalized in a statue of finest silver.

_I want to go with them._

Pale fingers caressing her, lips at her cheek. 

**_I spend so much time alone, darling. Why would I want more of it?_ **

Lara shivered, the last daughter of Krypton (or so she believed) on a dead world. Alone with a singular being. 

Invisible to both of them there was a tall being clad in dark robes with hair to match, and another in a semi-open suit, body a perfectly androgynous form, golden eyes shining with shock and horror.

_Brother Dream, I never imagined this._

Their sister Despair materialized beside them out of clammy-smelling shadow.

**I know, brother. It was a result of a game I proposed to her after the parliament. I had imagined Rao might have second thoughts on that gambit, but this....**

In a world of the dead, they saw Death's predatory stare and the Last Daughter of Krypton, being worn down and seduced by a sister whose merely stepping into the world had ended its nature in a manner unforeseen by Jor-El.

Absent its greatest hero, it would be Kara Zor-El, cast from Argo City, who would arrive on Earth and start an age of heroes subtly different, forever haunted by nightmares of a beautiful being clad in dark clothes with eyes of infinite shadows.

3) _She is captured instead of Dream_

Roderick Burgess stared, dumbfounded. 

"Son of a bitch, I didn't think it would work."

In the summoning circle he had a being, _the_ being he had sought. She seemed a girl of seventeen, waif-thin and flat-chested (and yet he felt a stiffening in his loins, her beauty having an unintended and to her very much unwanted effect). Her hair was a bushy mess, her fingers around one of her legs, clenched up, the other beside her. She gave him a level stare.

_**Well, you have me.** _

He did not know what, in truth, he anticipated. Either a frigid and icy woman in a robe with a scythe or a seductive temptress with beauty of stunning nature. Instead he heard a flat voice marked by resignation.

_**Now what?** _

"Son," Roderick said. "I intend to speak that word. None but me must be in the room."

His son stared questioningly but a bolt of magick convinced his followers to leave. Death's eyes went wide as she suddenly grasped the nature of what he was to speak, as an evil smile crossed Burgess's face.

He spoke a word of unfathomable nature, an antisound that slew any living being within a fifty foot radius (his son's teleportation spell but barely clearing the mansion and its neighboring space. His dog and a few other pets died but he did not care, that was less than nothing). Death screamed in sudden horror and then the sound was choked off, and she knelt within the summoning circle.

_By that name, I bind you, Death of the Endless. You are my servant, to myself, and to my heir._

_**What is your will, Master?** _

Burgess grinned a fell grin. "Oh I'm going to have all kinds of fun with you. Now you can leave the circle, my beauty." 

Hesitantly she did so, and then death came to a sudden and apocalyptic halt in existence. Burgess laughed a fell laugh. To him had come the towering creature that called herself Aiwass, clad in dark green armor with eyes that blazed like dead stars. She had promised him a power to make a Deathless world, and now he had Death for a servant. 

His hand was on her cheek.

"Now you're mine," he grinned, and he laughed malevolently as tears fell from dark eyes and she shivered in utter fear and trembling.

4) _She leaves:_

The Endless were summoned three hundred years before an errant sorcerer seeking to summon the Lost Daughter had caught the Dream King, weakened from a dreadful battle. They were summoned in a near-singular case by their elder sister, who stood before them all clad in a regal dress, the kind of style that she wore for the only time in her life, willingly. 

She had spoken words, then, simple ones:

_**I will retain my function for we all know what that means. But I am no longer of you, nor among you.** _

_**Farewell.** _

Her family barely had the time to react in manners suitingly. Destiny quietly fearful, Destruction bemused, Delirium and Dream horrified and stunned beyond reckoning. Desire outwardly apathetic and Despair meeting the gaze of a being who refused to meet her own.

When she was gone a long silence followed, made infinitely longer by the way her portrait became a blank spot with no means to contact her, only an apartment that gathered dust, fish that were taken to the Dreaming, and a teddy bear that became Del's favorite companion, as she named him Arminius.

The Endless family held together, but it did so from Destruction seeking to become more man than concept, deciding that his family needed him. With his quiet good sense and good taste, he brought the family together by a sorrow that was in them all and never faded.

Dream spoke only once, in the conclave after that:

 **She left us,** he growled. **We have no sister. Let her name not be spoken any longer. She is The Lost.**

And as it was spoken, so it became. 

5) _The Graveyard Book:_

**Are you sure about this, brother?**

Destruction nodded to Dream.

_Very._

She did not do this because she wants to be found.

_I know. But Del needs her, and we owe it to our sister._

Dream sighed.

 **You indulge her too much, Destruction.**

Destruction shrugged.

_You were closer to her than Del was, you can't possibly tell me with a straight face that you don't want to see her as much as Del and I do._

Dream sighed.

 **That is true. I hear she goes by a new name now, in the mortal spheres.**

Destruction smiled, softly.

_So she does. She's the Lady on the Grey now. I've seen her only once, though she didn't see me. Clad in grey and riding a magnificent pale horse._

Dream's lips twitched slightly.

Then in a shining flash of rainbow light their sister was skipping beside them.

**_We'Re oFf To SeE tHe WiZaRd!_ **

Both brothers rolled their eyes with an affectionate smile on their face, and they began the quest for the Lady on the Grey.

And for the first time in millennia, when the sundered family found each other, they saw their icy, brittle, austere sister had thawed and become someone very different, and what had been sundered was set anew. And Del, who had suffered so greatly with a broken heart, was allowed to spend time with her distant sister and in that time, for the first time, Death let herself begin to reach out to her family and to return.


End file.
